New transparent display means everyone at Starbucks will know you’re looking at porn

I know from watching countless hours of bad TV and movies that the future of touch displays is transparent sheets of glass that magically let you throw and resize images, all the while making annoying beeps as data readouts cascade across them, but I always thought we were still a good 15 years off from that. But check out this pretty sweet video of Samsung’s new 14 inch Transparent OLED Display Notebook, which appears to be very close to the future depicted in Minority Report, if not The Last Starfighter.

Sure, it isn’t a touch screen, and it looks like it would be annoying as hell to use, but it’s still pretty impressive, and a sure sign of where things are headed. What’s really interesting about the display is it hardly consumes any power at, and has no traditional backlight. Instead (I assume via sorcery) it uses “ambient light” to achieve a 500:1 contrast ratio. I’m not sure what this means for in-the-dark computing, and I’m not sure I like the idea of everyone sitting opposite me knowing what’s on my screen (albeit backwards) but still, this is cool, and anyone who remembers the G4 Cube knows that Steve would love to get a better working version of this into a clear MacBook eventually.

Comments

Nice proof of concept. Too bad the concept is stupid. Except for artists and very limited marketing, there’s not much use for a clear display. Even then, unless we switch over to hieroglyphics – and only communicating in palindromes, the transparency can’t really be used for much.

It looks neat but I see almost no application for this. Maybe some kind of rear touch display so that your fingers don’t obscure the display while you interact with it – except that doesn’t sound very ergonomic… it’ll screw your wrists all up.

This could make for cool unobtrusive displays in the home. Imagine transparent TV or computer displays mounted on a wall, kitchen cabinet or bathroom mirror. It would blend into the background when it’s not being used, but work as a display when active. If it’s mounted to something, the background becomes less important.

This could be in a full window displaying various infos (weather for example), like Tony Starks’ house. It could become opaque as you please or display animations. But for gaming or computing I see no use for that yet.

When did copying the movies become more important than image quality? This seems neat for advertising and we all know how much everyone just loves advertising. Now you won’t be able to even look out the window without some stupid ad popping up and bothering you. I sure can’t wait to have my windshield popping up crap to distract me while driving.

How about focusing on making the software and hardware WORK better rather than making it look like Tony Stark’s computer?